Variant

“Not yet,” Becky said. “But I don’t think anyone is old enough.” She took my arm again and turned me back toward the door. “How old are you?”

“Almost eighteen,” I lied, and then remembered that she had my records. “Well, I’ll be eighteen in about nine months. Happy birthday, by the way. You’re seventeen, too.”

Becky laughed and then stepped to the door. It unlocked again with a buzz, and she pulled it open. “I like you, Benson. You’ll do well here.”

Chapter Three

The foyer of the school looked like the natural history museum I’d visited back in elementary school. The floor was marble, and dark wood covered the lower half of the stone walls. It was the kind of place that my optimistic twenty-minutes-ago self would have loved and referred to as a beautiful, awe-inspiring palace of education. My current self thought it was an ugly, poorly lit haunted house. And now it was home.

Not for long. Maybe some of the other kids didn’t mind being locked in, but I did.

A massive staircase led up to the right, but Becky directed me forward, under a stone archway and down a long corridor. The front doors closed behind us with a soft thud, and despite the tall ceilings, I felt claustrophobic.

“So what were the rules the two runners broke? I mean, for real.” I had already decided that I had little intention of obeying the rules here-I wasn’t going to stay long enough for it to matter-but I wanted to know what they were. Just the fact that Becky seemed to be in a position of authority worried me. Anyone who had been an unwilling captive for a year and a half and yet seemed as unconcerned as she was didn’t deserve a lot of obedience.

Or was she a willing captive?

“No one is supposed to talk to the new students. Like I said, it makes more sense if I can explain what the school is like in a prepared presentation.”

Right.

“Also, they don’t want us to chase after the car. That’s against the rules.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

Becky turned to me and winked. “Ah, that’s the real question, isn’t it?”

She was starting to drive me crazy. Or maybe she was crazy. “And what’s the answer?”

The corridor branched, and Becky directed me to the left. I hadn’t realized how big the building was from the outside.

She shrugged. “They’re the Maxfield Academy. The woman who drove you in and her corporate office.”

“You don’t know? Don’t you want to?”

Becky opened a door and motioned me through. “Of course I want to know, silly. But I don’t know, so I’m trying to make the most of it.”

Inside the small room was a desk surrounded on three sides by tight, cupboard-lined walls. In front of the desk was a small leather sofa. She motioned for me to sit, and then moved to the desk, fiddling with some papers and jotting down a note for herself. The office was immaculately organized. The papers on the desk were in perfect stacks, not a single sheet out of place. There were two pens and a pencil, each one exactly parallel to the others.

Sitting made me anxious. I needed to be out doing something, talking to someone who was as angry about this as I was. I assured myself that there had been others watching through the windows-people who didn’t act like Becky. I’d find them.

She picked up a white three-ring binder with my name already on the spine. She walked around the desk and sat next to me on the couch, then crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt.

“Here’s the deal, Benson,” she said, in a new tone of voice: serious, but still a tour guide, as though she were showing vacationers around the site of a plane crash. “There are some people, like Curtis and Carrie out there, who go running after the car every time it comes. They go stand at the wall and talk about trying to climb over it and get away. They complain about every little thing.”

“Like the fact that we’re trapped?”

Even Becky’s frown was a half smile. “I know that it’s hard. But that doesn’t change anything. And the sooner you accept it, the sooner you’ll be able to enjoy yourself here.”

“Accept what? That I can never leave and I can never talk to anyone? What is this place? A prison?”

She shook her head. “It’s definitely not a prison, Benson. Does a prison look like this? Do prisoners get great food and a great education? Think of it this way: Even if you had a phone, is there anyone you’d call?”

I thought at first it was rhetorical, but she waited for me to answer.

“I’d call the police.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “If this was a normal school that let you use the phone, is there anyone you’d call?”

Was it that obvious that I was a loner? She knew my name before I’d told her; maybe she’d also seen my answers on the application-the answers that said I didn’t have any family.

I decided to lie. “I have lots of friends.”

“Do you?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Friends you’d call to chat with?” She leaned a little closer, watching my face.